Just World News with Helena Cobban

… could well be near, it seems?
I’m assuming Marwan Barghouthi will be part of it. Also, all the PA parliamentarians detained as hostages/ bargaining chips right after Shalit’s capture. Also, other Palestinian prisoners possibly numbering in the hundreds…
The political effects of this for Hamas would be huge. It would be another big political achievement for them.
I’m assuming Marwan would be a big supporter of Fateh concluding a speedy and decent reconciliation with Hamas. At this point, given the deep divisions within Fateh and the organization’s almost total internal political decay, his reactivation on the scene might be the only development that can allow Fateh’s deeply fragmented factions to come together on anything at all, whether in the negotiations with Hamas or (just possibly) in the broader peace process.
Also, the release of the parliamentarians would allow the (as it happens, Hamas-dominated) PA parliament to regain a quorum once again. So the ’emergency’ that gave Abu Mazen the space to run wild with ’emergency legislation,’ the emergency appointment of his own chosen PM, etc, would then be ended.
The politics and diplomacy of all this could well be fascinating and head in directions no-one in the west has yet really thought much about. Remember that Likud (which is coming in very soon) and Hamas have more objective interests in common than you might think…

In a lot of my recent blogging about the situation in the extensive gulag of “open-air prisons” in which the West Bank’s 2.5 million Palestinians have been forced to live since 2002 I have referred to these tightly quadrillaged areas as Bantustans. I think the term conveys some useful things to a world public about the stifling and continuously humiliating conditions in which the residents of these enclaves have been forcd to live for seven years now– and with no meaningful relief anywhere in sight.
(No relief in sight, despite all the ‘requirements’ specified by the US continuously since 2002, that Israel needs to “lift the roadblocks” that stifle normal life and normal economic functioning within the West bank, let alone between the WB and the rest of the world. Israel has been deeply non-compliant on that requirement, but has met not one iota of sanction from the US or anyone else in the international community because of that.)
Indeed, in many respects the residents of the Palestinian open-air prison enclaves enjoy considerably less autonomy from Israel than the residents of the apartheid-era Bantustans did from Pretoria.
But there are other differences, too. One key one has to do with the attitude of the local “rulers.” In the Bantustans, my understanding is that Lucas Mangope and most of the rest of the “leaders” installed as presidents of the respective Bantustans were for a while at least quite happy to take up that role and parade around as the “presidents” of their respective Potemkin “states.”
In the case of Yasser Arafat, he was generally pretty happy to parade around as the “president” of a Potemkin– because essentially powerless– “Palestinian Authority”. But none of the people currently in power in Ramallahstan is at all happy with the current status quo. They stick around in their various positions in Ramallah from a variety of motivations; but none because they are happy with the status quo. Some of them stick around because they’ve become addicted to the US-mobilized international dole on which they’ve lived, essentially, since their return to the West Bank in 1994; but there is shame and sadness in the way they look at their current role. Some of them– just possibly– stick around because they still “hope” the US, especially under its “new” administration, can work with them to win them the kind of West Bank and Gaza Palestinian state they’ve been working for for all these years. But honestly, I think the numbers of those “sincere” nationalists among the Lords of Ramallah must have shrunk close to the vanishing point by now. Case in point: Salam Fayyad.
So you’re left, essentially with the dole-addicted and the handful of profiteers, like those near the very top of the PA apparatus who’ve been making a killing out of the concrete supplied to build their encageing Wall. Not exactly a robust sociopolitical basis on which to build a policy of countering Hamas and its allies…

1. Bethlehem
One morning at the end of February I spent 90 minutes hanging out in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine, that is. And yes, the mayor’s office overlooks Manger Square, looking south toward the Church of the Nativity; so there is a certain sense of history to the place.
During our conversation, Batarseh wanted to make sure he got on the record with his scalding criticisms of Israel’s recent war against Gaza. “This war was not against Hamas. It was against the Gaza Strips’ women and children and its whole infrastructure,” he said.

They were trying to destroy the whole society there… Just as Sharon did here in the West Bank in 2002, and we still haven’t totally rebuilt from that.
How can the western governments, time and time again, ask their people to pay for all these damages caused by Israel’s military actions?

Bethlehem’s city council has 15 members: eight are Christians and seven are Muslims, and of the Muslims, five are members of Hamas. Batarseh is a Christian, affiliated with one of the venerable leftist factions of the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.
I’d been taken to Batarseh’s office by council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran peace activist and also, fwiw, a Christian. Visiting the office that morning were two of the Hamas council members and one of the Fateh members. Batarseh sat behind his desk, the council members and I sat in the easy chairs in front of the desk. Mainly we talked politics– in English and Arabic. There was a lot of camaraderie and good-natured teasing amongst the council members in the gathering, which assumed the feel, very familiar to me, of an Arabic style “majlis” get-together. Every so often a city official would come in to do some business, and there were some discussions of serious differences among the council members on the question of whether the number of peddlers’ cart licenses should be increased or not. (That one sounded like an issue of expanding the economic opportunities available to low-income people versus not scaring off valuable, revenue-bearing foreign tourists by having too many peddlers in the streets.)
Of course, given that the weather was very chilly that day the whole gathering was also lubricated by numerous rounds of hot drinks: yensoon (aniseed tea), mint tea, Arabic coffee, back to yensoon…
Armchair analysts in the west who believe that there are deep and possibly irreconcileable rifts between Fateh and Hamas would have done well to spend a morning with me in Batarseh’s office. “In Bethlehem, there are no problems between Fateh and Hamas because we know each other well,” Hamas councillor Saleh Shawkeh said. And the way the council members from the different Palestinian movements all interacted together seemed to bear out his words.
“Hamas has to join the PLO!” Zoughbi exclaimed at one point. Batarseh clarified that he thought that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should come in “under the PLO umbrella… and the PLO needs to be renewed and reformed so it can assure the representation of all Palestinians both inside the homeland and in the diaspora.”
Shawkeh said, “Yes, the PLO is a legitimate body but it’s not the only one in the field. So our idea is that the PLO needs to be fixed before we can come into it.” (That echoed exactly what I’d heard from two Hamas parliamentarians I’d interviewed a few days earlier, in Ramallah/Bireh.)
Batarseh jumped in with: “Hamas needs to change too… It shouldn’t reach for power by force, as it did in Gaza in 2007.”
Shawkeh: “Look, we did win power firstly by votes, but no-one let us even start to exercise our constitutional power after the election!”
Half an hour later a Fateh councillor (whose name I didn’t write down) also joined us. “There is no alternative but for both Hamas and Fateh to end the conflict between us,” he said, “for the sake of the Palestinian people.” Later on, though, he also chided the Hamas councillors, saying many Arab satellite news channels had been strongly biased toward Hamas– “and they never mentioned the suffering Hamas inflicted on the people in Gaza.”
When the conversation turned to broader political principles Batarseh betrayed his PFLP origins when he said,

We and Hamas both want peace based on justice… We preferred an outcome of one state for all the people in in it: the secular democratic state that used to be the PLO’s dream. A state based on religion or ethnicity is always going to have many problems.
Is there any space left for a Palestinian state any more, with all these Israeli settlements all around us and all these settler-only roads? If we’re going to have a Palestinian state we need it to be viable!

Later in the conversation he laid stress on the fact that, “All of us agree that the Oslo Agreement was a big mistake in which Arafat and the PLO gave away far too much.”
… All in all, it was a good– and very good-natured– political discussion.
Outside Batarseh’s office, the streets that snake around and up and down the steep hills on which Bethlehem sits were much quieter than usual. A commercial strike had been called by the PA that day, to protest against Israel’s newly announced plans to demolish 88 homes in the Silwan area of Jerusalem.
That strike was significant: It was the first nationwide public action called for jointly by both Fateh and Hamas. It was also an evocative reminder of the heady days of the First Intifada, 1987-93, during which the vast majority of the Palestinians’ protest actions had been nonviolent mass actions like commercial strikes, sit-ins, and marches. And yes, the commercial strike announced that day (Feb. 28) was remarkably widely observed– in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, in East Jerusalem, and in many other areas of the occupied West Bank.
The discussions inside the mayor’s chamber may have been friendly and warm, and the streets outside subdued and calm. But around the Bethlehem and its sister cities of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala stood The Wall, its forbidding 30-foot-high presence a constant and very “concrete” reminder of the encirclement of the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.
I cannot overstate how brutal and ugly the Wall is. It becomes a fence in many of the more rural parts of the West Bank. But here, as all around east Jerusalem, and in nearby Ramallah, it is definitely and inescapeably a Wall– one that’s about twice the height of the Berlin Wall, which was already shocking enough.
The Israeli Wall where it comes anywhere close to populated areas– and oftentimes, it will cut right through them– is punctuated by cylindrical concrete watch-towers that are even taller than the Wall. At the top of the towers are large, slanted-forward bullet-proof glass windows from which heavily armed Israelis look down on the Palestinians living below. There are also numerous free-standing watch-towers, also of 35-40 feet high. Sometimes their thick slanted glass windows looks directly into apartments on the upper stories of buildings.
The sheer size and extent of these Walls and towers– and the massive investment that has gone, and continues to go, into their ever-expanding construction– make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli government might be seeking peace with its neighbors any time soon.
Concentration camps were first invented by the British, during their wars against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century. The experience of being “concentrated” into these closely guarded camps did not make the Boer civilian population that was herded into them into a warm, pliant, peace-loving people, to say the least. No reason to think that Israel’s ongoing attempts to quadrillage, “concentrate”, and control the Palestinians of the West Bank would be much different.
But at least the Anglo-Boer wars came to an end and after just a few years of concentration the Boers were allowed back to their farms.
In Bethlehem or Beit Jala, by contrast, if you look out across the Wall to the areas outside it, most of what you see are the gigantic new Jews-only settlements of Gilo and Har Homa eating up more and more land with every month that passes. Those settlers don’t look as though they are going anywhere anytime soon. So the Walls and fences that keep the indigenous Palestinians away from those expropriated portions of their native lands likely won’t be coming down anytime soon, either.
As Zoughbi and I looked out westward across a valley toward what is now the settlement of Gilo he said, “Those used to be the fields and grazing lands for the landowners of Beit Jala. Beit Jala’s people had such wonderful lands– they used to stretch from here right down to the coastal plain. They took all that land… ”
At the end of my visit to Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Zoughbi took me to a bus-stop in the center of Beit Jala where we were lucky (on a strike day) to find a mini-bus heading for Jerusalem. You can read a bit about that trip here.
I can’t tell you how sad and guilty I felt that I– a complete foreigner– was able to travel fairly easily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem while Zoughbi, like the vast majority of other residents of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour have been forbidden since 2000 from traveling to Jerusalem, their close relatives and business associates there, and the many holy places there for both Christians and Muslims. And they, like all the other Palestinians of the West Bank have absolutely zero prospect, as of now, that these roads will be reopened to them any time soon.
Downtown Bethlehem is about seven miles as the crow flies from the center of Jerusalem.
2. Nazareth.
Back in the 1980s I made a couple of visits to Nazareth, which is the largest city in northern Israel and the largest Arab city anywhere in Israel. Back in those days if you started off from the– in my view exceedingly ugly– Church of the Basilica you could immediately climb upward into the dense network of tiny stone-paved streets that laced up the hills up behind it forming the dense and busy Arabic-style suq (market) that lies at the heart of all ancient Middle Eastern cities.
Back then, the guidebooks said that if you go to the second haberdasher on the right side of a certain street in the suq, you could get the key to a nearby, half-underground structure that was absolutely reputed to be the very synagogue in which Jesus of Nazareth, aged 12, had delivered his first sermon. In 1989 my father, a devout Anglican and something of a sermonizer in his own right, was staying with us in Israel/Palestine for ten days, and we couldn’t resist the temptation to seek out the haberdasher in question, and get hold of the key… Before long, we were standing in that very synagogue room, imbibing many centuries’ worth of pure ambience from the roughcut, cobwebby walls around us. Gosh, I must still have the photos of that somewhere…
And then, we exited the synagogue, coming out directly into the hustle-bustle of the suq that was all around us.
When I was planning the return trip I made to Nazareth ten days ago, I asked Jonathan Cook, a very smart British writer who I think has now earned the title of “The Sage of Nazareth”, where would be a good place to stay. Jonathan suggested I try one of the two little guest houses that have recently opened up within the Old City. I was excited. I love the intricacies, history, and bustle of the Middle East’s “Old Cities”. When I was in Damascus back in January our delegation stayed in a place called the Talisman Hotel, which is one of a number of small boutique hotels that have opened up in recent years– along with an even greater number of very fancy restaurants– inside the traditional, courtyard-based homes and “palaces” of the Old City… Or, you could think of the often smaller “riyadh” guest-houses established in lovely old homes in Marrakesh… One of the principal attractions of such lodgings is the fact that they are located in, and help to sustain the economic fabric of, fully functioning ancient downtown areas.
Well, that is there. But Nazareth is in Israel, which apparently doesn’t place much value on fully functioning Arab-style (and Arab-peopled) downtown areas.
Back in 2000, the Pope decided he wanted to visit Nazareth for the millennium. So a few years before that the Israeli government decided to gussy the whole city center up. That, according to Jonathan, involved closing down the entire downtown area for three years so the facades of the buildings could be entirely cleaned and standardized. The Pope came, and I imagine he may have looked at the facades for some minutes (or not.) But most of the shopowners and the residents who once lived above and all round them never returned. Downtown Nazareth became a nearly deserted urban wasteland, inhabited only by a small number of very poor squatters and drug addicts.
Jonathan has described the process as the “de-development” of the Nazareth downtown. You can see a few of his photos of Life in Nazareth here.
And guess what. Here as in Jaffa and Acre and the “de-developed” historic centers of other Palestinian cities inside Israel, Jewish-Israeli entrepreneurs have just now moving in to try to gentrify, boutiquize, and rebrand the Old City.
That is after, of course, the Israeli government has already, over the years, taken numerous steps to expropriate and re-purpose– for Jews only– many of the lands around the city that for generations were owned by Palestinian landowners. One of the biggest of these land-grabs was the one that resulted in the building of an whole new Jewish town, called Nazareth Illit (“Upper Nazareth”) on the hills north of town.
Historian Geremy Forman has written that,

Like other Jewish settlements in the Galilee, an important aim of Upper Nazareth was to ensure Jewish state control and sovereignty in the region. According to IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman, the new settlement would “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.” More specifically, Upper Nazareth was meant to address the challenge perceived as emanating from the all-Arab city of Nazareth. It would do this not by achieving a Jewish majority within the city of Nazareth itself, but rather by quickly evolving from a neighborhood into a city and eventually overpowering Arab Nazareth numerically, economically, and politically. According to Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael, the final aim of the settlement was to “swallow up” the Arab city through “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and “the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.” (G. Forman: Military Rule, Political Manipulation, and Jewish Settlement: Israeli Mechanisms for Controlling Nazareth in the 1950s, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), p.351, cited in Wikipedia.)

…Well, despite my disappointment about the sad fate of Nazareth’s Old City, I did have a good time during my short stay there. Jonathan and his wife, Sally Azzam, were extremely kind in showing me around. They showed me how to find some of the small number of functioning businesses inside the Old City. But we also wondered around many streets looking at some of the fine architectural details of beautiful old homes now falling into disrepair.
Both of them are really interesting people. Jonathan is an amazingly prolific and smart writer. He’s now published three books of his own, as well as contributing chapters to several edited volumes. (Details here.)
I managed to buy and read his latest book, Disappearing Palestine, before I got to Nazareth, and strongly recommend it. On his website he describes his perspective in these terms:

Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Sally was equally interesting to talk to. She is probably somewhere in her early thirties, and she’s a native of Nazareth. She talked about how, growing up there and going to one of the city’s many nun-run schools, she never heard very much talk at all– either at home or from her teachers at school– about the Nakba (catastrophe) that struck the whole Arab community of Palestine in 1948. She said her grandmother, who had lived through the whole Nakba, “never wanted to talk about it at all”, and her mother never said much about it until recently, either.
It was only after Sally went to university, in Haifa, that she really started to hear the Nakba discussed openly. And it was then, too, that she started to explore and strengthen her identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. (Official Israeli policy has always been to try to downplay the “Palestinian-ness” of the country’s Palestinian-Arab citizens, describing them only as “Israeli Arabs”, or further sub-dividing them into even smaller categories like “”Christian Arabs”, or “Israeli Druze”, or “Israeli Beduins”, or whatever… Anything but the dreaded P-word that might cause them– gasp!– to identify more closely with those of their cousins and brothers who had left as refugees in 1948 or who, living just a few miles south of Nazareth, were living under the yoke of Israeli military occupation in the confines of the West Bank.)
Sally also talked a little about how, young and eager to be “modern”, she was eager when she went to university to have her first real opportunity to make friends with Jewish Israeli girls her age. But she said that most of her efforts to do so were rebuffed: “They really didn’t want anything to do with us.”
These days, one of the things Sally is doing is working with one of the many “co-existence and conflict resolution” projects that have been started by NGOs within the Palestinian-Israeli community. She’s been working with a group of Palestinian-Israeli girls in Nazareth on life-skills, nonviolent communication, and things like that.
She recalled one recent event when “her” group of Palestinian-Israeli girls were scheduled to meet up and do a joint activity with a group of Jewish-Israeli girls who had been taking part in a parallel program someplace else. “Our girls were pretty excited at the opportunity to get together as equals, for once, with these Jewish girls. But when we got there, none of the Jewish girls turned up. They just couldn’t be bothered. It was pretty hard to explain to the girls in my group that this event they had been looking forward to, and preparing for, for quite some time– to the Jewish girls, it was just nothing.”
for me, that story of Sally’s was an echo of something Jewish Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher had told me just a few days earlier.
We were having lunch in a nice cafe in northern Tel Aviv, and at one point Alpher said,

You know, for the Arab states, they seem to act as if this ‘normalization of relations’ that they are holding out to Israel as part of the Arab Peace Initiative is a big deal. But it really isn’t. Most Israelis don’t give a toss these days about having good relations with the Arab world, becoming well integrated into the Middle East region, and all that. For an earlier generation of Israelis– maybe that mattered. But nowadays? No. The present generation of Israelis have largely turned their back on the Arab world. They’re much more focused on Europe.
Now, you have numerous Israelis who commute on a weekly basis between Tel Aviv and London or Amsterdam. Then you have the descendants of all those earlier generations of Israelis who came here from Poland or Romania or wherever in the 1930s: Now that most of those countries have gone into the EU, Israelis are reclaiming their citizenship rights there, and those EU passports, at a fast rate. Why would they want to be bothered with the Arabs?

Anyway, back to Nazareth: Guess who’s coming to the city again, (though in a new instantiation) this May?
The pope. H’mmm.
3. Tawfiq Zayyad
From 1973 until his untimely death in 1994, the Palestinian-Israeli Communist poet Tawfiq Zayyad was both Mayor of Nazareth and a member of Israel’s Knesset (parliament.)
Here, thanks to Wikipedia, are English-language translations of two of Zayyad’s best-known poems:

Here We Will Remain
In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain
like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat
like a shard of glass,
a cactus thorn,
and in your eyes
a sandstorm.
We shall remain
a wall upon your chest,
clean dishes in your restaurants,
serve drinks in your bars,
sweep the floors of your kitchens
to snatch a bite for our children
from your blue fangs.
Here we shall stay,
sing our songs,
take to the angry streets,
fill prisons with dignity.
In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain,
guard the shade of the fig
and olive trees,
ferment rebellion in our children
as yeast in the dough.
* * *
All I Have
I never carried a rifle
On my shoulder
Or pulled a trigger.
All I have
Is a flute’s melody
A brush to paint my dreams,
A bottle of ink.
All I have
Is unshakeable faith
And an infinite love
For my people in pain.

Zayyad was killed in a car accident in July 994, as he drove back to Nazareth after a visit he made to Jericho to welcome Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Arafat’s post-Oslo return to the West Bank.
How tragic was that?
4. Jerusalem
I have written quite a lot about Jerusalem here already– about the Jewish-Israeli western part of the city, from which some 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the fighting of 1948, and have never since been allowed to return, and about the now Israeli-occupied eastern part of the city from which some 2,000 Jewish people were ethnically cleansed during the 1948…
The eastern half of the city includes the city’s historic and fascinating walled Old City, home of some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic religions: The Kotel, or Wailing Wall, beloved as a place of intense lamentation by Jews; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is, truth be told, much fought over among a myriad of Christian churches; and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) of the Muslims, home to the highly venerated Al-Aqsa mosque and the gold-carapaced Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the spot from which the prophet is reputed to have sprung on his horse during his mystic Night Journey… The Haram al-Sharif is also reputedly on the site of the Jewish people’s destroyed Third Temple. (The Kotel that we can see is the wall facing a portion of its foundation. The lamentations there are over the destruction of the temple.)
Ah, as soon as I write about this sacred geography, and its intimacy, you can start to see the complexity and incendiary nature of the issues involved.
No wonder my friend Moshe Ma’oz says “The negotiators should start with the issue of Jerusalem, not end with it. With goodwill and mutual respect all round these issues can be resolved. And once you’ve solved Jerusalem everything else falls easily into place.”
However, the mutual respect part of this might require quite some effort to build. After Israel’s military occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967 it almost immediately set about trying to Judaize as much of the city as it could. First it seized back control over the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Then it decided to make a big ceremonial plaza in front of the Kotel, for which purpose it demolished 135 Palestinian homes in the Mughariba Quarter near the Wall, along with two neighborhood mosques and the shrine of a Sufi saint. Then, almost immediately, it set about building thick swathes of Jewish settlements in such a way as to stifle the city’s remaining Palestinian residents and to cut them off from their cousins and compatriots in the rest of the West Bank.
For this purpose, too, the Israeli government unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem considerably beyond where they had previously been and then declared the unilateral Anschluss of the whole expanded city to the State of Israel. The Palestinians trapped inside the annexed city now number 220,000. The number of Israeli settlers quite illegally planted into the occupied east of the city number around 195,000. The boundaries of the city are ringed by the brutal concrete Wall.
And still the demolitions of Palestinian homes inside the city continues, as does the creeping forward of Israeli settlement projects right through the heart of historic Palestinian neighborhoods both within the Old City and outside it…

On March 3, I had an intriguing discussion in Jerusalem with Benjamin Pogrund, a bluff Jewish guy in his late sixties who “represents”, in the way he thinks and argues, the way a lot of other left Zionists think and argue. Indeed, I think he represents it very well since his argumentation veers almost minute by minute between, on the one hand, some sharp analysis of the vileness and extreme dangers posed by the Israeli right and anguished calls for the US to intervene to “save the two-state dream” in Israel/Palestine, and then on the other, angry and self-justifying outbursts against Hamas, as well as against anyone who dares to question the actions and thought processes of the Zionist “left” or to pose any alternative to their worldview.
And yes, like the vast majority of other “Left” Zionists including Amos Oz, David Grossman, Amos Elon, etc, Pogrund was a clear– though oh-so-terribly-“anguished”– supporter of the early days of Israel’s recent war on Gaza.
And even after some of the other Left Zionist war supporters had started, four or five days into the 22-day war, to start arguing that “hey, perhaps that is enough!”, Pogrund continued flacking for the war in the western media. In this January 9 (equals Day 14) contribution to The Daily Beast, he wrote:

In the third week of December, more than 200 [Gaza-origined] missiles struck [Israel]. They were 200 too many. Barak and Olmert accepted they could no longer hold back. The army was ordered to put into effect plans that had already been prepared.
Why did the world keep silent for so many years? Could anyone really expect Israel to do nothing forever?

No mention anywhere in Pogrund’s narrative there of the facts– easily discernible from the right sidebar in this listing from Btselem— that between January 1 and December 26, 2008 the violent actions of the Israeli military had killed 413 Palestinians in Gaza, among them numerous civilians.
And then, if you scan quickly down the listings on this page from Btselem, you’ll see that of the 18 Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians in that same period, only seven were killed anywhere near the periphery of Gaza, of whom five were described as killed by “gunfire”, one as a result of a suicide bombing, and only one, 73-year-old Lyubov Razdolskaya, was killed by “an explosion”— that is, presumably, the impact of a Gaza-launched rocket or “missile”.
So how could a government stand by and just let that happen, Pogrund was asking? (That was Barack Obama’s justification for Israel’s war, too.)
But if having one civilian– and no soldiers– killed by those primitive rockets from Gaza in the whole period of 2008 prior to Israel’s launching of its war was “too much”, then how much more “unbearable” or unacceptable” must the situation of Hamas’s de-facto rulers have been, given the harm and suffering that Israel’s exponentially more lethal military had inflicted on them during those same months?
Pogrund did not say.
When we were sitting together in the lobby of the American Colony Hotel and talking, he rehearsed his justification for the war yet again: “When rockets are hitting cities like Beersheba and Ashqelon! And 1.5 million people are under threat! We’ve been bloody lucky not to have suffered worse casualties.”
“But Benjamin, there was another way Israel could have used to renew the 6-month ceasefire. How about negotiations? The massive application of violence was never, as you’re arguing, ‘the only way’!”
“I agree,” he said. “But how on earth do you deal with someone who won’t accept the three conditions, who won’t even recognize Israel?”
I could have pointed out– though the conversation moved in yet another direction at this point– that when Olmert had negotiated the ceasefire with Hamas that lasted, generally successfully, from June 19 through November 4 last year, Hamas had not “recognized Israel” at that point… But the ceasefire generally worked, from Israel’s point of view; and that, even though Olmert’s government never even implemented what the Hamas people had understood to be his firm commitment to lift the siege on Gaza early on in the ceasefire period.
So “recognizing Israel” really is a red herring. It was one for prime minister Olmert back in June last year when he was negotiating the ceasefire, and it is today, even though the US government is once again stressing that Hamas (and Hizbullah) have to do this even before it will agree to open any kinds of contact with these organizations.
But it is not, apparently, a red herring for Benjamin Pogrund or for many other Left Zionists.
Indeed, for Benjamin Pogrund, who spent most of his life in South Africa and then immigrated to Israel just 12 years ago, gaining other people’s “recognition” of Israel seems almost like an article of faith. Toward the end of our discussion, just before we expressed our cordial goodbyes to each other and he went on his way, he was leaning forward out of his chair and berating me saying,

The difference between us, Helena is that I believe in Israel! I believe in a Jewish state! My family lost so many members in the Holocaust. Of course we have to have a state!

I tried to point out mildly that my family, too, had lost members during World War 2, doing its bit to fight Nazism in Europe. But he carried on, jabbing one finger in the air, vaguely in my direction: “You don’t believe in a Jewish state. I do! I believe in Israel!”
Okay, Benjamin, I understand. It’s an article of faith for you. You’ve made your point.
“Believing” in Israel as a Jewish state is not just an article of faith, however. It is also integrally linked to the stark refusal with which the vast majority of Zionists, “Left” as well as Right, respond to any suggestion that the claims of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 from their homes in what became Israel that year should be given any serious consideration– or even, any fair hearing– at all.
The principal claim that these refugees and their descendants have hung onto over the past 61 years has been their claim to have a “Right of Return” to the places of their family’s origin, such as is guaranteed to all persons in Article 13, Clause 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Pogrund was emphatic on this point: “I don’t know why people talk about the Right of Return,” he said, very loudly, earlier in our discussion. “It won’t work! It’s a non-starter!”
But back to this concept of “believing in” the State of Israel. The concept of belief is, of course, one used primarily within the concept of religion. There and in other contexts (“Yes, I believe the Number 30 bus should be here in a minute or two… “) it is used to express adherence to a fact or a set of propositions that can’t be empirically proven.
But the State of Israel very evidently– as I have directly experienced it on occasions too numerous to mention– does exist. I pass by its border posts; I see its military; I pay taxes and exit fees to it… And I imagine Benjamin Pogrund has had all these experiences of it and more.
So what is this business about “belief” all about?
Does it have to do with a fear that in the future it might not exist? Is that, perhaps, what the power (and the uncertainty) of belief is being harnessed to?
Or does it have to do with an attempt to persuade, or browbeat, other people around the world to recognize not only that Israel exists (which surely we can all agree on), but also that it has the right to exist… and beyond that, that it has the right to exist as an explicitly and permanently Jewish state?
Well, I have Scottish ancestors. Hebridean ancestors, too. Does Scotland have a right to exist as an independent nation-state? Do the Hebrides? Interesting questions, both of these, in the days of the continuing devolution of UK power…
I imagine that if you looked hard enough, you might find people who desperately “believe” in the idea of a Hebridean state. They would need to re-experience and re-express that belief, to each other and to anyone else who will listen, I imagine; and to do so with all the greater fervor precisely because no such state now exists and it is highly unlikely that it will exist any time in the foreseeable future…
Meanwhile, as an informational footnote here and in the context of he “recognition of Israel requirement” that the US-led west is continuing to seek to impose on Hamas and Hizbullah before Washington will deign to speak to these two politically powerful movements, I thought it would be a good idea to go back to the actual language that was used back when the PLO first gained its “kashrut certificates” from, respectively, the US and Israel, back in 1988 and 1993.
In December 1988, in the context of the PLO’s endorsement of its “Declaration of Independence”– independence, that is, of a still completely notional Palestinian state that would exist alongside Israel– and of a carefully orchestrated move to open a dialogue with Washington, Yasser Arafat made this statement (PDF) in Geneva:

Yesterday in my speech, I made a reference to the United Nations resolution 181 [on the partition of Palestine] as the basis for Palestinian independence. I also made a reference to our acceptance of resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for negotiations with Israel within the framework of an international conference. These three resolutions were endorsed at our Palestinian National Council session in Algiers.
In my speech also yesterday it was clear that we mean our peoples’ right to freedom and national independence according to resolution 181 and the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security and, as I have mentioned, including the state of Palestine and Israel and other neighbors according to the resolution 242 and 338.
As for terrorism, I renounced it yesterday in no uncertain terms, and yet I repeat for the record that we totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism…

And secretary of State George Shultz responded:

The Palestine Liberation Organization today issued a statement in which it accepted U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism. As a result, the United States is prepared for a substantive dialogue with PLO representatives…

As it happened, the dialogue that was thereby opened proved to be short-lived. But it is interesting to see the wording of what was judged to be “enough” recognition of Israel back then to open the dialogue. certainly, Arafat was not required to express any recognition of any Israeli right to exist “as a Jewish state.”
After that dialogue fell apart, the PLO won no new opportunity to talk directly to Washington until after it had concluded the 1993 Oslo Agreement with Israel. In the context of the Oslo Agreement, which was concluded directly between Israel and the PLO, the two parties exchanged “mutual recognition statements” (PDF).
Arafat’s letter to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stated this:

The signing of the Declaration of Principles marks a new era in the history of the Middle East. In firm conviction thereof, I would like to confirm the following PLO commitments:
The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.
The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
The PLO commits itself to the Middle East peace process, and to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations.

In a short side-letter to Norwegian foreign minister Johan-Jorgen Holst, Arafat promised that,

the PLO encourages and calls upon the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to take part in the steps leading to the normalization of life, rejecting violence and terrorism, contributing to peace and stability and participating actively in shaping reconstruction, economic development and cooperation.

For his part, Rabin sent only a single-sentence message back, directly to Arafat:

Mr. Chairman,
In response to your letter of September 9, 1993, I wish to confirm to you that, in light of the PLO commitments included in your letter, the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.

So Rabin was not promising any recognition of a Palestinian state (as we know), and he was not promising not to use violence against the Palestinians; and nor was he promising not to continue building “facts on the ground” (settlements) that might prejudice the outcome of the negotiations.
Well, a pretty raw deal for the Palestinians all round, I’d say. Or rather, some extremely shoddy negotiating by that sad and vainglorious man, Yasser Arafat.
But it is still interesting to note the wording of what was deemed by Israel, at that point, to be sufficient to include the PLO in negotiations: a simple statement of the right of Israel to exist in peace and security. Nothing about the right of Israel to exist “as a Jewish state”…

Jerusalem is a city that has many different meanings to many different people, in many different contexts. It is a home-town to some, a much-loved but now unattainable birthplace for others, an place of special religious value to others. It is a center of commerce, education, and professional services. It’s a city of breath-taking beauty and also one in which 30-foot-high concrete walls pierced by even higher watchtowers march plumb through residential neighborhoods, brutalizing everyone…
At the political level for nearly 41 years now it has been a city of far-reaching, deeply institutionalized discrimination against people who happen to be non-Jews of a sort that if it were practiced anywhere in the world against Jews would (rightly) be the cause of massive international opprobrium.
It is not a unified city, as anyone who lives there can attest to.
It is a city in which the war crimes of the construction and peopling of illegal settlements, and of destruction of the homes and infrastructure of the indigenous residents, have been continuously committed for nearly 41 years.
It is a city whose wellbeing and integrity is a matter of intense concern to just about all Arabs (Christian and Muslim), and to monotheistic believers around the world but especially perhaps to the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims and 14 million Jews.
It is also, intriguingly to me, a city whose 220,000 current Palestinian residents form a special kind of bridge between the concerns of the Palestinians of the other occupied Palestinian territories and those of the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Jerusalem’s remaining Palestinian community has been under tremendous stress– since their city came under Israeli occupation in 1967, and even more so since Yasser Arafat’s conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in 1993. Before Oslo, and even throughout most of the First Intifada, the Jerusalem Palestinians could easily sustain their relationships with their compatriots (often close relatives) who happened to be residents of the rest of the West Bank, of Gaza, or of 1948 Israel. After 1993, the Rabin government started erecting a ring of steel between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank. Jerusalemites could go out through the checkpoints– which were later supplanted by The Wall– to visit the West Bank, but West Bankers were prohibited from traveling in to the city that had previously been their main urban center.
Cut off from its longstanding natural hinterland in the West Bank, the commercial and professional bases of Jerusalem Palestinian life quickly started to wither and in many cases die.
Gaza meanwhile became cut off from the whole of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by the upgraded Wall the Israelis started constructing to encircle it right after 1993.
Jerusalemites have, however, been able to keep up (and expand) their contacts with the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, the greater numbers of whom live in Galilee, in northern Israel. this relationship has become increasingly important for the Jerusalemites’ survival– both commercially and politically.
The vast majority of Jerusalem Palestinians– along with the few-thousand remaining Syrian residents of the occupied Golan– always refused to take up the “offer” of Israeli citizenship that was made to them, fearing this might strengthen Israel’s claim to longterm control over the areas they live in. This decision has left the Jerusalemites extremely vulnerable to the whims of the occupying power. And though the ICRC and some other international organizations continue to try to exercise some form of monitoring over the many violations of the Geneva Conventions to which the Palestinian Jerusalemites have been subject, the vast majority of the US-led world long ago seemed to acquiesce in practice in the argument strongly proclaimed by Israel that East Jerusalem “is already” part of Israel, and should remain so.
This, though only the “governments” of Micronesia and a couple other very small countries ever formally accepted Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the whole of the city.
The Palestinian Israelis, however, are citizens of Israel– even if only of a second-class nature, given the institutionalized discrimination that still exists within the proudly “Jewish” state. Palestinian-Israeli leaders and popular movements have maintained long campaigns to, for example, send busloads of their people up to Jerusalem on weekends so they can spend discretionary shekels in the souks and restaurants of East Jerusalem, thus keeping alive businesses that might otherwise founder. They have also rallied strongly around the campaign to try to prevent home demolitions in Jerusalem, one that has been gathering steam in recent weeks.
The politics of the Jerusalem Palestinians has therefore become increasingly closely tied to that of the Palestinian Israelis. (Over recent years, this has become an increasingly Islamist form of politics.)
In a seminar I recently went to in East Jerusalem’s Ambassador Hotel, the recently re-elected Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Said Naffaa described the Palestinian people as configured like a triangle. Its three sides consisted, he said, of:

1. The Palestinian residents of the occupied territories;
2. The Palestinians of the “ghurba” (the diaspora), which is by far the largest of these three groups; and
3. The Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who constitute the smallest of the three groups, in number, but also by virtue of their citizenship have special capabilities and special responsibilities to the nation as a whole.

It seems to me that the Jerusalem Palestinians occupy a special position within this basically triangular structure. They are part of Group 1, but they also occupy a key bridging role with Group 3. (Also, like all other members of Group 1, they have very close familial relations with Group 2, since just about all the OPT Palestinians have close family members who have been forced into exile by the combination of Israeli policies to which they’ve been subjected.)
Jerusalem is emerging as an increasingly critical issue in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The city’s 220,000 Palestinian residents lie, obviously, at the heart of that issue.